Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 31

My Bookstore Now Using a CDN

When you buy ebooks direct from me via tiltedwindmillpress.com, your books will now be delivered via BookFunnel. After a purchase, they’ll send you an email containing your download links.

Why make this change after eight years? In short, customer service.

BookFunnel can help you sideload books onto your weird ereader. I cannot. Bookfunnel can cope with weird network issues more easily than I can. They have an actual support staff and multiple delivery channels, where TWP has me and I’d rather b...

Kickstarter Campaign Results

My small, low-risk trial of Kickstarter, where I hoped to raise $500? It 1768% funded.

I guess there’s a demand for this book?

My back-of-an-envelope math says that my total expenses will be about half of that. I’ll keep detailed notes, of course, but for a work with no obvious audience in a field where I’m not known, Kickstarter made writing DYB not a financial loss. Plus I’ve learned how Kickstarter works and how to assemble videos.

DYB is due back from copyedit in mid-December. With anything ...

New Test System

Now that “DNSSEC Mastery 2/e” is ready for copyedit, I can turn my attention to “OpenBSD Storage Mastery.”

Back in 2014, I bought a machine for writing the ZFS books. Ten hard drives. 32 GB memory. Enough power supply to heat my office during a Michigan winter, which was great during Michigan winters and not so great in the summer. Fan noise that belonged in a datacenter. That machine’s now in the basement, ready for me to test things that require large amounts of storage.

As of today I have a m...

640% Kickstarter, Sponsorships, and Shipping

In forty-eight hours, my experimental Kickstarter funded six hundred and forty percent.

Those of you who told me so, may now commence declaring that you told me so.

I am considering using Kickstarter for future books, in combination with my sponsorship program. (Sponsors pay me while I’m still writing the book.) The sponsor program will never go away, mind you. My end goal is reader disintermediation; I want folks coming directly to me for their books, instead of buying through Amazon or whoever...

“Domesticate Your Badgers” Kickstarter Opens

My first ever Kickstarter crashed past its first stretch goal in three hours.

I think nonfiction books should be written by people who have done the thing. If you write a book about systems administration, you ought to have been a working sysadmin for years. If you write a book about rats, you better spend quantity time with the squeaky little bastards. If you write a book about martial arts, you better have been a serious student for decades. That’s why I don’t write a book about, say, devops. ...

New time travel short story escaped, new Kickstarter approaching

In the aftermath of getting DNSSEC Mastery to tech review and getting my first ever Kickstarter ready to launch, I went in search of easy dopamine. I have maybe forty-odd short stories ready to publish, so I seized the one on top of the heap and flung it out into the cold hard world.

My tale Drag Air Through Fire is now available at all fine bookstores. Supply chain problems have made the paper chapbook stupid expensive, so I solidly recommend the ebook.

She isn’t dead.
He just hasn’t saved her...

October 2021’s Bipolar Updates

This business is enough to make you bipolar.

Yesterday, someone went out of their way to inform me that while the technical content in TLS Mastery was impeccable, the book was not as funny as my other tech books. If any other author had written this book they would give it five stars, but on the Lucas Scale it rated only four.

First: it is very true that writers rely on reviews for their business. I appreciate reviews posted anywhere, for any reason, of any rating. I explicitly don’t want to kno...

Halloween Ebook Sale: Immortal Clay

If you want something scary to read this October, the ebook of my novel Immortal Clay is on sale most everywhere for $2.99. If you saw John Carpenter’s The Thing and thought “hey, wouldn’t it be great if the alien had lived and escaped and eaten every living thing on Earth,” this is the book for you.

You can grab it from:

My e-bookstore (2-book bundle)KoboApple BooksGumroadAmazon US, Amazon AU, Amazon UK, Amazon CA, Amazon DE, Amazon FR, Amazon IT, Amazon ES

Google Play is coming in a day ...

2021 Soroptimist Auction Results

I’ve been screaming my fool head off on social media for the last few months about my auction to support Soroptimist International Grosse Pointe. After I post this, I can shut up about it.

We raised $2200. The money will be used to help human trafficking survivors clear their records. This is an extraordinarily high amount for a single auction, and achieved that only because of the generosity of my readers.

Jay Hannah kicked things into gear by bidding $1000–and immediately donated the entire am...

Auction Last Day

If you’re interested in the FreeBSD Mastery: Jails — Bail Bond Denied edition charity auction, it closes today at 5PM EDT.

The current lead bid is at $1000, but here’s the twist: he’s already made the donation in that amount.

If you win with a bid of $1001, you’ll raise twice the money and screw over the current leader. How often do you get to do something unquestionably good out of spite?